Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College, is a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.”
In “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” published on Aug. 6, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote that because “American taxpayers invest hundreds of billions of dollars into higher education every year…. American universities must put Americans, and American interests, first.”
She is, in this singular instance, right.
Unfortunately the administration of which she is a part is profoundly wrong about what constitutes “American interests.” During the first two years of the second Trump administration, the number of international students studying in colleges and universities in the United States declined by over 110,000, or more than 10 percent. The decline in international enrollments in doctoral programs has been especially steep, at about 15 percent.
Today, 35 percent of the PhD-level workers in the sciences in the United States are foreign-born. A decline in the number of such highly skilled people who were born elsewhere can be expected to cause severe problems for the American workforce and the American economy in the future.
The economic impact of the decline in international students is only one part of a more complicated story. Critics of higher education often complain, with some reason, about the negative effects that a campus monoculture can have on the quality of student learning. Having been president of a college that enrolled students from dozens of countries around the world, I can testify to the fact that international students help prevent monocultures from forming. If one of the purposes of education is to encounter viewpoints and backgrounds that are different from one’s own, the presence of international students is central to the fulfillment of that purpose.
Among current world leaders, 66 were educated at American universities, an essential pathway to expanding American culture and influence and building meaningful relationships around the globe. The soft power created through the American educational system might not appeal to Stephen Miller, but it has, I would argue, done more to create a positive impression of the United States than any of our recent military adventures.
It is a tribute to the abiding strengths of this country that the decline in international enrollment has not been even steeper, given the policies and rhetoric of our current government. The rate of the decline did increase sharply from 2025 to 2026, however, and there is good reason to expect that it will continue at a similar or greater rate going forward.
International students are of course the ideal target of the Trump administration because they exist at the intersection of two of its obsessions: attacking higher education and keeping immigrants, particularly those with Black or brown skin, out of the United States.
No surprise, then, that the government has created a growing list of obstacles that make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for international students to reach or remain in the country, including travel bans, “enhanced” screening, and halts to visa interviews. The administration has attempted to eliminate a longstanding policy that allowed international students to remain in the country for the duration of their programs of study and instead to institute a four-year cap, making it impossible for students to complete most PhD programs. There’s also a proposed $70,000 fee for visa holders pursuing Optional Professional Training programs. A new fee of over $100,000 for some new applications for H1-B visas. And nine universities — mostly the usual targets — are being investigated for “J1 visa fraud.”
A number of these proposals have been put on hold by the courts, but the uncertainty they create is nearly as damaging as the proposals themselves. That is, I suspect, the point.
An argument used by the Trump administration to justify the exclusion of international students is that they are taking the place of qualified Americans. This claim deserves to be taken seriously. There are a few highly selective schools that boost both their selectivity and their tuition revenue by enrolling an unusually high percentage of full-pay international students. Some 26 percent of the undergraduate student body at New York University, whose acceptance rate is in the single digits, is made up of international students, clearly in an effort to increase revenue.
More common among the most selective schools is the percentage of international undergraduates at Harvard or Northeastern or MIT, which ranges from about 11 to 15 percent. This seems wholly appropriate for leading global institutions. By way of comparison, 20 percent of the undergraduates at Oxford University are international; about 20 percent of the students at the Sorbonne and 15 percent of the students at the University of Beijing are international.
The reality is that most colleges and universities without the resources and prestige of Harvard or MIT are enrolling international undergraduates not in place of Americans but in place of empty seats: The combination of a sharp demographic decline in high school graduates and the decision by more students to skip college is leading schools to search everywhere for students. It is fair to place some of the blame on the failure of colleges to control costs and demonstrate value, but these problems will not be solved by barring international students and hastening the closure of schools upon which many American students and many American communities depend.
Ultimately the question is simple: Who wins if fewer high school graduates and master’s degree candidates and doctoral students in the sciences from around the world are permitted to study in the United States? Certainly not our economy, our scientific and technological leadership, or the American students whose world will become more insulated. The ones who will benefit are those who compete with and seek to displace the global stature of the United States.